Truant / Rough Sleeper

Following last year's excellent Kindred EP, Burial's latest effort showcases 25 minutes of new work that hews closer to his much-imitated future-garage sound while also exploring fresh territory that at times feels almost celebratory.

From the time of his first single in 2005 until he revealed his identity in August 2008, Burial maintained a carefully cultivated anonymity, arguably inventing the idea of the unknown but well-branded producer in the age of too much information. After the release of the landmark Untrue in 2007, Burial went quiet for almost two years. There was a lot of talk then about where his music might go next, about whether there was anywhere left for it to go. It's become a familiar problem in electronic music: when you create and own a sound completely, how do you continue to grow? Does growth matter? Until his first 12" collaboration with Four Tet in 2009, it seemed like the man born William Bevan might just avoid addressing the question at all. The steady series of collaborative and solo 12"s he's released since are an inspiring example of how to re-draw the borders of one's aesthetic. He's still Burial, and he still owns this sound, but he's slowly and surely expanding the idea of what Burial means.

Bevan has accomplished this, in part, through his creative use of the 12" format. If Untrue was an album that sometimes felt like a single masterful song, Burial's best work since consists of long tracks that feel like miniature albums. "Truant", the A-side of his latest 12", is nearly 12 minutes long and unfolds in distinct sections that, taken together, form a riveting narrative. The track immediately establishes itself as prototypical Burial: It moves from a brief opening drone to the familiar clattering snare; the crackles, the mournful synths, and the brief vocal sample are all there. Then, the idea of "prototypical Burial" is taken on a journey. Four minutes in, the tempo and rhythm shifts completely, the vocals change, and the mood moves away from bleary contemplation towards sharp-edged anxiety. When garbled orchestral samples enter in the final third, Burial is exploring completely new territory with fanfare-like music that feels almost celebratory. This is not the stuff of empty 5 a.m. streets, the echoing sense of comedown and loss. The music feels deep and wide and grand, and yet it still sounds like no one else. "Truant" is the Burial track as wide-ranging suite, and the progression from Untrue's "Archangel" to here is staggering.

The B-side, "Rough Sleeper", covers just as much territory. Shifting into an up-tempo beat, the track folds in organ chords, pitch-shifted vocals, and, ultimately, a repeating music-box refrain that sounds like a bummed-out and broken version of a Latin-inflected piano refrain from a house track. The word "soulful" means different things to different people, but this earns that designation; there's a touch of gospel warmth to it, something that feels even optimistic. Usually, when Burial samples a voice saying something like, "There's a light surrounding you," it sounds like a dying memory. Here, it sounds like an acknowledgement of the glory of the here-and now. "Rough Sleeper"'s emotional world is quite different from that of "Truant"; where the latter feels deep and wide, it oozes intimacy.

Truant/Rough Sleeper doesn't have the intensity of last year's Kindred EP, and it leans closer to the classic Burial sound, but its subtlety is its own reward. Who knows if or when a full-length follow-up to Untrue will arrive, but as long as Bevan continues to release smaller missives of this quality, it hardly matters. Taken together, this 12" and the Kindred EP are roughly the same length as Untrue; the form and content are in perfect sync.